Email Handling Ability for registered users to contribute to threads via email

محروم.كوم · #1 06-07-2010, 03:50 PM

Yahoo Groups is very popular. I'm on several groups on Yahoo Groups and I believe the simplicity of contributing via email is what gives this bit of functionality it's appeal, together with the fact that many potential users of sites like ours can only just set up their email client. On the lists on Yahoo Groups that I'm on, the majority of users do not seem to use their Yahoo email address, although Yahoo will have allocated them an email address (I have a Yahoo email address automatically but I don't use it). It's so simple...just type an email in your email client (in my case MS Outlook), put the address of the particular thread in the "send to" box and send. You don't even have to type in the whole email address...your email client will prompt you.

I've seen negative comments on other threads where Yahoo Groups has been discussed along the lines of "creating heavy server load". However, this is a manageable problem if you restrict the functionality to threads on forums where you have a high chance of generating revenue.

The reasons we want it are:

we have existing users of Yahoo Groups repeatedly asking us for this bit of functionality in order to participate in our site i.e. the option to contribute via email is extremely popular. They don't necessarily mean to abandon Yahoo Groups, they want to contribute to our site as well.

having this option would give us the chance to move some of these users up the experience curve and learn to use something else

the groups we are interested in are small groups of high value users who want this functionality and by high value I mean in terms of potential revenue generation

hand held devices are increasingly popular and email usage via hand-helds is becoming more popular

in theory you can surf the web via a mobile device but in practice mobile broadband connection speeds vary widely and it can take a long time for the pages to load in areas where you can still send and receive emails

it's important to keep users engaged with you, partly because if you don't then they go somewhere else, and partly because their contributions help you to generate interesting content

some of these users are averse to advertising but happy to subscribe to something

It would be tempting to think that this would be counterproductive if for example your site required a lot of page impressions to generate advertising revenue. However, because we are talking about small groups of high value users this is a manageable problem if you can restrict the functionality to certain threads, possibly subscription only threads or threads on which you have a high chance of gaining other revenue e.g. via sponsorship.

As to the value of it if like Internet Brands you are charging (~ 400 dollars?) per installation supposing you have a group of 100,000 users - which is most valuable to you: One installation serving 100,000 users or 20 installations serving 5,000 high value users? And if you are an IB/vB.* customer and you want any other bit of functionality on this suggestions forum if IB can increase the size of it's potential market, would that not allow it to raise extra cash to fund the other suggestions?....or to pay developers to help with the migration from 3.8.* to 4.0.*?

In reality this won't cannibalise Yahoo's business because users will contribute to both. However you are more likely to get more installations of vBulletin if you can give users what they want because the people buying the software will collectively be able to do more for their users and afford more installations.

Lots of people are registered with Yahoo Groups because contributing via email is simple and popular. Not because they are wedded to Yahoo.

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